AI agents should prepare, not decide

Every AI surface I ship runs on one operating principle: agents prepare, humans decide. The agent drafts, triages, and synthesizes. The human reads, judges, and ships. The moment that line blurs, trust collapses — and in medicine and high-stakes advisory work, trust is the whole product.

Why "prepare, not decide"

An agent that decides is a liability you cannot supervise. An agent that prepares is leverage you can review. The distinction is not philosophical — it is operational. It changes what you log, what you show a reviewer, and where you put the approval button.

The best AI workflow feels like a sharp colleague who hands you a clean draft — never one who quietly acts on your behalf.

What this looks like in practice

• Every agent output is a draft with a clear "approve / edit / reject" gate.
• Confidence is a signal shown to the human, never a threshold that auto-publishes.
• The audit trail records who approved what, and why.

Designed this way, AI stops being a risk to manage and becomes a system you can actually run.